Julia v1.12, the unreleased version which is currently in release candidate stage (and has had a longer RC stage than expected but should be done at least by the end of the year) has the ability to fully ahead of time compile and generate binaries, like you would expect from a language like C. It also trims these binaries so that they are a reasonable size given the elements of the runtime that are used. Thus for good type-stable code you get callable binaries without JIT overhead, and this leads to a much better CLI experience. It will take a bit of time so that there's more package tooling and support built around this feature, but this is the path a lot of the ecosystem CLI tooling is now going and that will be a pretty dramatic shift in the usability for these kinds of use cases which Julia had traditionally ignored.

aot will help a lot. In cases of simple programs you can also start Julia with no optimizations, which trade off the startup latency for runtime speed.